A while ago a person on Duolingo (Really good website for interactive language learning) suggested that a course be made teaching English from Toki Pona. I think this is a great idea and i was wondering if ya'll wanted to collaborate on making that course. If just two or so people sign up they probably will not consider it, but if we get maybe 5 or so people to sign up then we might actually get this course added.

I submitted for this course yesterday as well and someone on the fb group said they'd done the same (unless sina li ona). Some of the languages on the incubator only have two or three contributors so that shouldn't be a problem and they've added esperanto and klingon so conlangs are a-ok. I did worry a little that the english translation of my toki pona submission came across as a little awkward (as english transations of texts originally in toki pona tend to be) and that might harm my chances at being selected...

This is one of those things where I'm interested in principle, but I don't know if I will be able to contribute very much due to time constraints. However, I would be happy to sign up, and do what I can if and when it gets off the ground.

I think the idea of tp as a gateway language is more that the experience of learning one language makes learning the next easier, not that learning English, say, from a tp textbook would be easier than from a textbook in your L1. In fact, of course, tp is badly set up for that purpose, lacking a convenient vocabulary for just about anything important in English: tense, gender, agreement, parts of speech, passives, and so on forever. The best you could do is put up a number of tp sentences and reasonably literal and literate English translation. Since tp does not do reductions at all well, if at all, this would show how various sorts of English reductions work, and that is an enormous part of English. The unreduced stuff is pretty much the same but English runs its NPs backwards.

I want to sign up in the incubator but i am not "fluent" in toki pona Hopefully soon I can.As for teaching things like gender and number, we could have a lesson maybe called "mije/meli" and "nanpa mute en nanpa lili" then give a bunch of examples that would teach the ideas through repetition. It might be easier to construct such a course with two or three sentences in TP then one sentence in Eng.One problem that i can see arising from a TP > Eng course is that the "Proper" translation vary and so we would have to restrict it to more literal translations.